Search in: Publications on Equality and discrimination

May 2018

The “Women’s and Youth Empowerment in Rural Tunisia” study uses, for the first time in the Arab world, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) to investigate the topic of gender equality. The study employs a large-scale survey of rural, semi-urban and
urban Tunisia to map levels of empowerment among women and young people between the age of 18 and 30. The overall objective of the project is to provide new measurement tools and data to policymakers and organisations to allow them to better design, target, monitor and evaluate initiatives aiming to empower women and young people across Tunisia.

April 2018

Cooperatives set up and run by workers in the informal economy are among the solutions in meeting women workers’ care needs, while also helping protect their labour rights. This report complements the ILO's previous studies with cases from Brazil, India, and Guatemala on how informal economy workers’ organizations can mobilize through cooperatives to provide child care services to their members. The case studies highlight diverse forms of child care provision and outline the varied partnerships needed to implement and sustain child care services for informal economy workers.

March 2018

This is a summary of the report “Advancing cooperation among women workers in the informal economy: The SEWA way” which aims to provide an understanding of the challenges and opportunities for cooperatives and other SSE enterprises in empowering women workers in the informal economy with a specific focus on the experience of Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA).

Workers have rights and entitlements that are established in laws, employment contracts, collective agreements and workplace rules, as well as in custom and practice (the way things are normally done – and have been done for a long time – in a particular workplace, industry or occupation). We say that workers have a grievance when they believe that some aspect of these is not being respected by their employer. Grievances are usually described as ‘individual’ when only one worker is involved and ‘collective’ when a group of workers all believe they are suffering from the same breach of the rules. Grievances relate to addressing infringements of existing rights and entitlements, from bullying or harassment, to underpayment of wages, refusal to grant rest periods, weekly rest days or public holidays, discrimination or underpayment of bonuses or other entitlements.

Indigenous and tribal peoples’ disproportionate representation among the poor and limited access to social protection are linked to their low levels of participation in decision-making. Social protection programmes may not sufficiently take into account their cultural integrity and ways of life. Guaranteeing at least a basic level of social protection, a social protection floor for all, including indigenous men, women and children, represents an essential component of national strategies for sustainable development. This brief highlights the importance of social protection for indigenous peoples and provides ways for ensuring a rights-based framework for promoting social protection for indigenous men, women and children.